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    Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion
    Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion
    Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion
    Audiobook5 hours

    Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion

    Written by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

    Narrated by Lloyd James

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    "I am a man torn in two. And the gospel I inherited is divided." Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, our compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction that undoes the injustices of the past. Wilson-Hartgrove traces his journey from the religion of the slaveholder to the Christianity of Christ. Reconstructing the gospel requires facing the pain of the past and present, from racial blindness to systemic abuses of power. Grappling seriously with troubling history and theology, Wilson-Hartgrove recovers the subversiveness of the gospel that sustained the church through centuries of slavery and oppression, from the civil rights era to the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond. When the gospel is reconstructed, freedom rings both for individuals and for society as a whole. Discover how Jesus continues to save us from ourselves and each other, to repair the breach and heal our land.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChristianAudio.com
    Release dateMar 13, 2018
    ISBN9781545904282
    Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion
    Author

    Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

    Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (M.Div., Duke Divinity School) is director of the School for Conversion in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a member of the Rutba House new monastic community. He is the author of To Baghdad and Beyond and coauthor of Inhabiting the Church: Biblical Wisdom for a New Monasticism. He is also the coeditor of School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism. Catch up with him at newmonasticism.org.

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    Reviews for Reconstructing the Gospel

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      This is a very personal story about a white pastor who slowly learns about the role the Christian church has played in perpetuating white supremacy and enforcing a racial divide between white people and people of color. The author recounts his encounters with a different perspective as he began to reach out to his black neighbors. They met him with grace and provided an education and eventual conversion experience so that he was finally able to begin working with them.His experience is very humbling because he believed he had come to save these people and lead them to a more united place, but really he was the one that needed help to recognize his own internalized racism and the lies his religious background had taught him. I found this book moving as a personal story, but ultimately I found it a little shallow in handling the subject matter and a bit too forgiving of the hateful perspectives so many in the church have towards this issue. I'm hoping to use his educational resources to find more books by people of color that will dive more deeply into this topic. Still, it was useful as an entry point into the topic.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      This book isn't going to convince anyone of anything. I felt like he made a lot of assertions and rarely if ever bothered to back them up with anything. If you already agree with him, I suppose it will probably make you feel good.
    • 4/5
      A personal story of reflection regarding the Christianity in which the author was raised and his reckoning and grappling with its roots in and complicity with slavery, white supremacy, and oppression, and the attempt to "reconstruct" the Gospel to be more consistent with the Good News of Jesus.The author is white and shares his story of having to acknowledge how churches in the American South perpetuated oppression both in the days of slavery and long afterward, and how it remains embodied in much of what passes for Evangelical political action. He speaks of getting to know black people active in the community and the church in North Carolina and how those experiences transformed him. He writes of the work of justice being done which seeks to relieve oppression. For those willing to hear, and especially those who already agree with at least most of the author's premises, the book is powerful and compelling. Yet I wonder how it would be viewed by who would be ostensibly the author's desired audience, those who have not yet come to his viewpoint: it may seem strident and overly, to put it nicely, "prophetic" in tone. At times the author becomes guilty of confusing the symptom from the cause: colonialism, and the spread of capitalism as the world's economy, for instance, do not stem from "slaveholder religion," but come from farther upstream, Western cultural and religious chauvinism which defined how it looked at the world, led its people to explore and conquer and enslave, and remains in many forms to this day. Overall a challenging message to hear for those willing to hear it. Most of the time the author is not wrong. That does not mean that what he has to say is easy to absorb.**--galley received as part of early review program